Confessions of a Corporate Shopaholic

On Measure Me This, one of the many measurements of procurement people is how much cost savings we can bring to the company.  Another common scorecard item is how much of the overall spend we get ourselves involved in.  It would make us redundant if we deliver fantastic results but over a very small fraction of the entire spend is unaddressed.   There  is of course a distinction of in-scope or out-scope spend as identified in almost every procurement policy in most established global companies, but we as strategic procurement professionals always strive to push that boundary further.

The key is whether we can add value.  There is no point of getting involved in things that we will only drag down the process.

If we are convinced there are value-adds to bring to the table, we need to bring our strategies, similar successful case studies, potential solutions as well as our execution plans and knock on our internal customers’ doors.  That is very much like a salesperson. 

I recently came across an article on CPO Agenda (CPO stands for Chief Procurement Officers, an executive role that is gaining prominence over the last decade), “Face it, we are salespeople” by Paul Snell, which includes a quote from Roy Anderson, CPO of financial services firm State Street.

“… the ability to implement change was primarily down to the staff you employed.  Do you have people in your organization who are intelligent enough and confident enough to drive change and can be the authority in that category?…”

“… do your staff have the skills to explain change and innovation throughout the business?  They might be a great negotiator or market analyst, but for this, they needed to communicate and sell.  Face it, we are salespeople.  Procurement is definitely long gone.  We sell concepts to internal customers, we sell to our supplier base to be more innovative in their solution set and we sell to the internal customers to explain what the changes need to be…”

Personally and especially in this part of the region, I am seeing very few procurement professionals who do this well.  They are either too boxed-in to their comfort zones of negotiating and bidding, or way too customer oriented that they end up being “corporate servants” which they do not deserve to be.  Striking the balance is a lot harder than it looks, and therefore whenever I hire in my specific area of strategic procurement, I look for these soft skills which are much harder to be groomed comparing to product knowledge or negotiation techniques.

If you are interested, more of Paul Snell’s articles can be found on his blog.